The Rear View Mirror

A couple days ago I was able to catch up with a friend of mine, who I grew up with at the Bill Rice Ranch. (Vince, for those who know who I’m talking about.) He attends Maranatha, so I tracked down his cell phone number and gave him a call and told him about a church that was pretty close by. He was able to make it down and brought a couple of his friends with him. One of the guys worked with us at the BRR a couple summers ago, when I went to do promotional photography work.

It’s always interesting to hear what pastors and principals say after the dramas. The pastor that night brought out an interesting point during the invitation for the drama “Journey to Gehenna.” The pastor used the following verse:

Ecclesiastes 7:2 “It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart.”

For those that aren’t familiar with “Journey to Gehenna,” it is a very sobering drama about the reality of hell. It takes place in first century AD, and tells about a rich Jewish leader, who you find out is actually, well I probably shouldn’t ruin the ending in case it’s done for Vespers or something. Anyway, he brought home the point that we need to hear tragedies like that, so that we will keep our hearts burdened for souls. I hadn’t thought of that verse applied to drama before.

For Karlyn’s birthday, her mom and piano teacher came up Sunday night, so they went out to eat and then stayed at a motel. Her parents bought her the camera you see her with here. Maybe i’ll post some of her pictures later.

Jon and I went to the Harley store in Milwaukee, where it all began. I bought my dad some “Biker’s Brew,” coffee, which I’ll send home.

We are heading back “south,” away from the open land and toward Milwaukee. We have a three hour drive to our one o’clock chapel, and then another three hour drive to Milwaukee.

Here in Wisconsin, cow farms seem to be everywhere because of the cheese industry. Even in the towns they have cow crossing signs.

Last night Sarah did Marie’s part since she was sick, and since we introduce each other Karlyn introduced Sarah. We were trying to think of something unique to share about Sarah, so I suggested the fact that she had cheese curds the night before for the first time would be interesting. When Karlyn said it during the service, the audience gave Sarah a round of applause.

After about a month and a half, we are heading out of Illinois. I’ve really enjoyed crisscrossing the state, because now when somebody at school says, “Oh, I’m from a little town you’ve proably never heard of.” I’ll at least be able to give them a run for their money.

We are headed up to Wisconsin, and we’ll be there for a little over a week and then we’ll be in Minnesota. I’ll let you know if we hit any record temperatures. Pray for Marie if you think of it, because she’s not feeling very well.

Finally, Jon and I had a chance to get some Illinois barbecue. The family we stayed with yesterday took us out to eat for Sunday lunch and Jon and I were pretty excited when they pulled up in front of RJ’s Barbecue. I had baby back ribs. They use a sweet sauce. It had a real good flavor, but hung on the bone pretty hard. It was very filling and of course my hands smelled like barbecue the rest of the day.

This was next to some dish network promotion where they would give you a free dish, so I’m guessing existing customers were upgrading. It caught my interest because of working at BJ HomeSat.

While in Galesburg, we stopped at Carl Sandburg’s birthplace. This is in the back yard and is a park designed after one he wrote about in a novel. He asked for his ashes to be placed under the rock.

After chapel Tuesday morning we stayed around for a senior citizen luncheon. Jon and Karlyn shared testimonies, and Ben and Sarah sang. I ran the sound system. They had a lady who lived nearby come in as a guest speaker to share her testimony. Her parents immigrated to the Chicago area from Yugoslavia. One day her mother was working outside and heard some singing in the neighborhood. A few days later she heard it again, so she went to see what it was. She found some Christians who were meeting in someone’s house and singing hymns together. They began sharing the Gospel with her, but she explained that she already had her own religion. Over time, though, their persistence was rewarded and she was saved along with her husband. They quickly became burdened for their relatives living in Yugoslavia, so they began writing them telling about their faith. However, they were met with stiff resistance telling them to stop writing. (more…)

The school we were at today had an interesting collection. The hallway of the school went around in a square and on the walls were original oil paintings of portraits of every president and his wife. They were done by an artist of the name Lawrence Williams, who is still painting. The paintings were given to them by a donor, who has continued to buy the new paintings as the presidents are elected. So, in 2000 when Bush was elected they received their paintings a few days after the Whitehouse. The collection has been appraised at over $250,000.

This photo courtesy of Ben. Any photo on this blog you can click and it will show an enlarged version uncropped. We had some downtime in a city that we had a service in three weeks ago, and while driving through town someone started honking at us and it was the pastor’s son driving beside us.

The father of the family Jon and I are staying with is retired and does wedding videos now. He uses two Sony VX-2000s, which are very nice MiniDV camcorders. We talked for a long time about his setup and I explained what we do at BJ HomeSat. The church has a video setup, so we recorded the program this morning.

Saturday night when we got to Schaumburg they were having a Deaf fellowship, so I was able to go down and play some volleyball with them and meet a few of the teens. It was primarily a teen and young adult outreach function, so most of the people there don’t go to the Deaf church. Pastor Coleman gave a challenge after the games and then they had some food. I was surprised to see so many kids there. My guess is there were about 150 or so, and I was told turn out was actually low for this one. I’ll post a picture when I get a chance. The next morning I attended the Deaf Sunday school class and just shared my testimony in signs. Brian Lievens, who graduated a few years ago is up there and attends the Deaf church. His father-in-law is Pastor Coleman. Ivy, Nick Ng’s aunt, was there also.

UPDATE: Here’s the promised picture.

Pastor Tipmore did a great job as Karlyn’s dad. I’ll get some pictures
up when I can. Before they left we gave Pastor and Mrs. Tipmore BJ
t-shirts and signed our names on the back of Pastor’s. He really helped
us out of a pinch. Jon on the other hand went to a clinic in town to
see a doctor, so hopefully he’ll be able to get some medicine and be
able to rest this afternoon.

Schaumburg went great. Thank you for your prayers. This morning, however, Jon woke up with zero voice. Well, we were frantically trying to figure out how to make things work without the antagonist. It just so happens that Karlyn’s parents are going to be at this chapel, so as we were brainstorming for solutions, somebody threw out the possibility of Karlyn’s dad playing the part of her dad in the drama. So she called her dad, and gave him the lines. I’ll be sure to give an update of how it goes.

The second store in as many weeks. I could get used to this. This one is in Woodfield Mall, which has the largest retail space of any mall. Mall of America has an amusement park in it.

I just put up another picture gallery from our excursion in Springfield, IL. It’s actually from a couple weeks ago, but I just put it together. You can check it out here, or it will be on the links to the right.

I have been meaning to tell about the play we went to on Navy Pier at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. It was the opening performance of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. Before the play started, people came out on the stage and were frantically trying to get things ready for the performance, because the actors’ bus had broken down. They were trying to figure out which play they could do with the number of people they had. They tried Romeo and Juliet, so they told one of the stagehands to go get ready to play Romeo. (more…)

Jon and I are having a little bit of difficulty with sore throats. We aren’t feeling sick, it’s just our throats, but Schaumburg is coming up so we’ll need all the vocal production we can muster. We’ll be miced, but as Dr. Polson says, “Microphones don’t amplify what’s not there.” We’re going to try voice rest and zinc lozengers this weekend, but please pray everything goes well Sunday.